Ricky Gervais, A Day Later

Last night, Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globes, after weeks of anticipation. Based on his performance last year — and the way in which the show was advertised — it was expected that Gervais would slash and burn his way through the proceedings, insulting every star in the audience and every presenter who dared share the stage with him.

That this did not happen — that this did not even come close to happening — is the talk of the country today.

Yet in the end — and I was fooled, too –I suppose it was pretty unrealistic to expect Ricky Gervais to go after that audience. If he ever wants to finance a movie, if he ever wants to cast a movie, if he ever wants to distribute a movie, if he ever wants to create another television show, if he ever wants to find anything resembling a friendly colleague when his career is in need of help, he cannot afford to alienate the people in that room.

The people in that room control the industry, and the people in that room are either the people that he must go to for virtually everything, or they are close friends with those people.

We think of guys like Ricky Gervais as bulletproof because, well, they’re better off than we are. But every career, especially one at the top, needs the help of other people at the top. The thumbs-down of the clan is something that no career can survive for long — and even if that were possible, the struggle involved in trying to find an open door in a hallway of locked doors is not worth it for a wisecrack.

Indeed the history of the world is full of people who wrecked their careers because they could not resist telling an irresistible joke. And then it got back to the King, or the dictator, or the president, or the station manager, or the studio head, etc. And then the world turned black, and every head turned away. First they laughed, then they turned away.

With this in mind, you don’t even have to threaten a guy, or make a deal. You just have to know, going in, that the man in front of the microphone has something resembling a survival instinct and is in reasonably good enough health that he expects to be alive for a few years. If you have that, you have nothing to fear.